


our voices are too broken for battlecries (hear the birdsong, sweetheart, and awaken)

by mouseymightymarvellous



Series: run baby run [6]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Beginnings, During and, Female Friendship, Gen, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Post-Thor: The Dark World
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-17
Updated: 2016-11-17
Packaged: 2018-08-31 09:27:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,115
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8573044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mouseymightymarvellous/pseuds/mouseymightymarvellous
Summary: The sky falls over DC, and all Darcy can do is watch.The sky falls and SHIELD with it. Darcy inherits a legacy of wreckage and of wars her forebears never quite won.(The sky falls, and a dreamer wakes up.)





	

**Author's Note:**

> _They are not a collision course but a coincidence. In a billion other universes, they never meet._
> 
>  
> 
> This is not the fic I actually wanted to write, but it was the one in my head. Hopefully we'll get back to your regular Wintershock programming some point soon. Prequel to the entire _run baby run_ verse, and overlaps with ["i've got an eye for danger"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7847071).

Darcy's in the middle of a jungle in Central America teaching sex education and handing out anti-malaria mosquito nets when the sky falls down.

It's Greg who stumbles into the large tent where Darcy is gesturing at an anatomical drawing of a uterus, doing her best with her stilted high school Spanish and the help of her translator Mari to impart her hard-won knowledge of the reproductive system onto a class of women and girls.

The class turns to look at him where he's wavering at the tent flap. 

"Greg," Darcy says, "what is it?"

“It’s— It just came through on the radio. Breaking news: SHIELD declares Captain America and the Black Widow fugitives."

It takes her a long minute to take in that outrageous statement, but when it finally pierces through the shocked ringing in her ears, the ground gives out beneath her, and Darcy staggers. Suddenly, she doesn't know where she stands. 

"What? Why?" she demands. 

With the small portion of her brain not giving over to considering the political implications of this or screaming silently, she notices that her hands are shaking. 

"I don’t—" Greg shakes his head. "They don't know. That's the official statement. I've got to go tell the others." He backs out of the tent entrance without waiting for a reply, too wrapped up in his own stunned disbelief. 

Darcy turns back to her confused class. 

“Seño,” Camila, one of the younger girls, ventures, “¿qué pasa?”

Darcy stares blankly at the closed tent flap, mind racing. She thinks of men in black, of iPods that disappear in to the ether of bureaucracy, of calling and calling and calling about the end of the world and getting shut down at every turn. She thinks of heroes and of spies and of the kind of things that grow in dark places, between stacks of paperwork and overworked government employees and a system with too many cracks. "I'm not sure yet," she says to herself, and turns back to the uterus on her makeshift wall.

##

“Goddamnit Jane!” Darcy yells into the almost-full voicemail box. “Would you just pick up your fucking phone so that I know you’re okay?!”

##

The eeriest part of watching the helicarriers rise and rise and rise above DC until they blot out the sun is the sense of déjà vu. Because it is familiar: clumps of people standing hushed around grainy tv monitors as they watch the end of the world. 

It isn't like the Chitauri Invasion; it's much too human for that.

She is thirteen again, and the Towers are crumbling and nothing will ever be the same after this.

They stand in hushed clusters, clutching hands and tissues, unable to anything other than watch. 

The helicarriers rise above DC, and then they fall and they fall and they fall.

In the wreckage lies the twisted remnants of Peggy Carter's dream and the legacy of everything she fought against. (And though Darcy doesn't know it yet, from the wreckage emerges a twisted remnant of Steven Rogers' memories and the legacy of a war that never quite ended.)

Wreckage remains, and Darcy turns back to a thing she can fix.

##

She lunges for the phone when Bahram calls her over, waving the satellite phone in her direction.

“Jane?” she breathes into the receiver. “Please tell me that’s you.”

“The Tower was in lock-down,” Jane explains, her voice soft and small and painfully bereft of starlight. “Nothing in or out.”

Darcy exhales, some of the stress finally leeching out of her at the confirmation that Jane is safe. She had hoped and prayed and believed with everything she could muster that Jane was okay. That Stark would keep her safe.

Darcy has never been so thankful for Jane’s undying grudge against SHIELD stealing her research that one time and her endless quest to find someone else—anyone else—to fund her work.

“Oh thank god.”

“I’m sorry,” Jane goes on, still small and diminished. “I didn’t want to worry you.”

“I know. But there really wasn’t anything else for me to do.”

“I miss aliens,” Jane sighs.

“Right back at you, boss lady.”

For long moments, they just listen to the crackle-pop of the satellite connection and the soft susurration of their breathing. For long moments, they just think about when it was just them and the endless desert and the stars, when their biggest worry was having enough duct tape to fix the machines when they fell apart, when life was simple.

“Have you seen the Insight list yet?” Jane finally asks.

Darcy snorts. “Not yet. We don’t have a decent enough internet connection and the radio stations have only covered the big names.”

Jane hesitates. “Do you want to know if you’re on it?”

“Why would I be on it?” Darcy demands. “I mean, I’m guessing that you are, am I right?”

“Your name is just under mine,” Jane tells her, sounding oddly affronted.

“Huh.”

“I don’t know why you’re surprised.”

Darcy isn’t really sure how to explain to Jane—Jane who is made of stardust and unshakable dreams and an intellect and drive that burn like the sun—that Darcy didn’t even expect Shieldra to remember her name. She was just the intern: no one important at all.

“Well, my baba would be proud. I feel like you’ve done good if you’re on the Nazi-offshoot kill list.”

“Bedyuk!”

Darcy laughs at Jane’s bad Hebrew.

Their conversation meanders away, then, from the threat hanging over them. Darcy doesn’t forget, not with the stress still curled tight at the base of her skull, but she lets Jane’s science babble and the starlight in her voice wash over her.

The sky might have fallen over DC, but Jane’s stars still shine bright overhead.

##

_In DC, a ghost looks up at something that might have once been his reflection. The ghost doesn't know the ember eyes looking back out at him, looking back out at a past that the ghost does not remember forgetting._

_The ghost doesn't know the ember eyes or the head-thrown-back-throat-baring-body-shaking laugh or the echo of the Man from The Bridge. The ghost only knows the memory of ice burning in his veins and the certainty in his bones that he was once more than he is._

_The ghost doesn't know what he knows._

_Standing orders say: return to the nearest base and wait for orders from the Handler._

_Something older and deeper and truer than cold lightning racing through his blood says: run._

_The ghost looks up at something that might once have been his reflection. The reflection laughs back. The ghost does not remember laughter._

_His blood sings, but his bones are steady._

_He runs._


End file.
